Installation view, Gala Porras-Kim: A Hand in Nature, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, March 8, 2024–September 1, 2024. Photo by Wes Magyar.
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About the exhibition
Gala Porras-Kim is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work questions how knowledge is acquired and how artworks and objects function as meaning-makers inside and outside of arts and cultural institutions. Her recent work has investigated the collecting practices of museums, questioning what is being collected and how it got there; her art imagines what might happen if those objects had a say in their possession and their future.
Her solo exhibition, A Hand in Nature, focuses on the natural world and lived environment, building upon questions she developed while researching historical collections. Many of the artworks on view distill natural processes into sculptures, drawings, and installations that slowly grow, evolve, or degrade over the course of the exhibition. From sculptures rendered with salt-saturated concrete or copal resin wetted with local rainwater to drawings created from slow drips of water and projections made from light refractions, Porras-Kim’s work imagines what might be possible if natural forces and phenomena were granted creative agency.
The exhibition also features works that recast our understanding of the history of human civilization, as well as research-oriented works that serve as case studies for the repatriation and return of artifacts to their primary locations and functions. These works highlight how the values and priorities of humans today may often run counter to those of peoples from the past, as well as to processes in nature. The projects shown here prompt visitors to reflect on and reorient our relationships with nature and other living beings both past and present, in the hope of moving towards a dynamic characterized by respect, dignity, and camaraderie.
Gala Porras-Kim was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1984, of Colombian-Korean descent. She lives and works in Los Angeles and London. Porras-Kim is a finalist for the 2023 Korea Artist Prize.
Curated by
Leilani Lynch, MCA Denver's Associate Curator
Leilani Lynch, MCA Denver's Associate Curator
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On view from Friday, March 8 to Sunday, September 1, 2024
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Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the Scintilla Foundation.
